Yesterday, I spoke at the Women’s Leadership Exchange Conference in Tempe, Arizona. The keynote speaker was Poppy King, better known as The Lipstick Queen. She recently came out with a book detailing her adventures as an entrepreneur. Adventures are what she sure has had. Poppy founded her original company when she was 18 years old. She built it into a multi-million dollar business and then she lost it. After a corporate stint, she has now started a new business where she’s focused on avoiding the mistakes that she made with the first. The good news is that it seems to be working and her new business is well on its way to being a success.


As the keynote speaker, Poppy shared some of her lessons. She started off by saying what it means to be a ceo — having a vision and making mistakes. And she then went on to say that being a leader is all about learning from your mistakes. Just that simple.


Poppy hit it right on the head.


When I was running Dreamlife, Fred Rosen (the former chairman of Ticketmaster and all-around tough guy) told me that my job as ceo was to make 100 decisions a day. He said that on day one, I should be happy to get 50% right, and that as the days went on my batting average should go up. His point was that as head of the company I had to keep making decisions even if some of them — a lot of them, even — were wrong. It was the only way to keep moving forward. And the way to get my batting average up was to learn from the mistakes. After all, he said, iron isn’t made with sand, it’s made with fire.


It’s a bit of wisdom I was glad to be reminded of.